The 'fuck you' pattern (2021) • Hacker News Board

Re: The 'fuck you' pattern (2021)

#61

Post by macNchz » Sun, Jun 25, 2023, 3:58 PM UTC

Reddit’s mobile web experience really embraces this–even as a logged in user there is a frequent “Use our app!” popup that has been made progressively more obnoxious.

Once upon a time there was a preference option to disable the popup, though it would periodically become unchecked on its own. Then the option to disable it disappeared. Then the popup started appearing not just on page load, but after a period of time while you’re partway down the page reading, instantly jumping your scroll position to the top and making you lose your place. The ultimate effect has been that I swore to never, ever install their stupid app, and I spend way less time there on my phone, which is probably a good thing anyway.

Re: The 'fuck you' pattern (2021)

#62

Post by Garvi » Sun, Jun 25, 2023, 3:58 PM UTC

tough wrote: post #15

totallywrong wrote: post #10

It's most annoying when businesses make IG their actual website, or restaurants have their menus there, etc. I've never been on IG and can't access the content, so they don't get my business.

You can still go to the restaurant to eat presumably they'll have some paper menus in there, or QR's or whatever

Aren't QR codes just a fundamentally flawed system due to how much easier they make phishing attacks?

Re: The 'fuck you' pattern (2021)

#63

Post by derefr » Sun, Jun 25, 2023, 3:58 PM UTC

aaomidi wrote: post #38

bee_rider wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was how restaurants worked for a long time. Of course, if you prefer the predictability of seeing the menu before you get there, that’s your preference, fair enough. But I wonder if you might miss out on some places run by cooks who put all their talent into cooking, and none into technology. Could be some good stuff…

Talent isn’t a zero sum game. It takes next to no effort to throw your menu as a photo on google maps for example.

AFIAK those pictures-of-menus don't come from the restaurant owner, but from the people dining there. I believe they're partly scraped from restaurant review sites like Zomato (where the pictures-of-menus are interspersed with pictures-of-the-food-itself) and partly the result of Google doing Google Lens things to your Google Photos to figure out that you took photos while inside a restaurant, and then asking you if it can use them.

Re: The 'fuck you' pattern (2021)

#64

Post by ranting-moth » Sun, Jun 25, 2023, 3:59 PM UTC

Search engines have always penalized sites that serve different content to users vs. the search engine.

This fuck you pattern feels like a variation of that trick so in my opinion it should be heavily penalized.

Re: The 'fuck you' pattern (2021)

#65

Post by EGreg » Sun, Jun 25, 2023, 3:59 PM UTC

sledgehammers wrote: post #14

galoisscobi wrote: post #8

I don’t think this is a dark pattern per se. You don’t expect to walk into any restaurant and get free food. With meta products, you pay for content by being tracked. If you refuse to sign in, they refuse to show you content. It’s simple.

Except in a restaurant, the chef gets paid. In this platform, value is extracted from the chef, the waiter, the eater, the eaten, and their interaction, while tearing down societies. Not a fair comparison.

Welcome to shareholder capitalism, extracting rents from all sides of the market perpetually to enrich shareholders. This is why utility tokens were such a big game changer for me.

Remember Zuck was an open source bro who turned down M$ for $1M and ended up open sourcing Synapse. He built Wirehog, as a decentralized file sharing network.

I was attending TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 in NYC and personally heard Sean Parker speak proudly about how they “put a bullet in that thing” — because it threatened corporate profits and rent extraction.

Sean Parker learned not to mess with corporate profits, when his company Napster got sued into oblivion by the other “lock up the IP monopoly” industries — music and movies. MPAA and RIAA. So he started Plaxo and learned to be VC.

Then he brought Peter Thiel, the guy who seriously advocates “competition is for losers, build a monopoly”. He gave Mark a lot of good advice and the VC industry turned him from an open source bro into a corporate golden boy who buys up the competition, the founders of which leave in disgust after their golden handcuffs are off (WhatApp, Oculus, and yes Instagram).

This isn’t an isolated story. Elon owns Twitter. Bezos owns Amazon. The nicer guys like Ohanian and Jack got out, after selling, though. And they all want decentralization now.

Moxie left WhatsApp and started an end-to-end encrypted messenger (Signal).

Re: The 'fuck you' pattern (2021)

#66

Post by bombcar » Sun, Jun 25, 2023, 4:01 PM UTC

silasdavis wrote: post #45

totallywrong wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've actually stood up and left restaurants when their QR menu sends me to IG.

Perfect on a first date.

You’ve got to case the restaurant, run background checks on the staff. Can the menu be read without a phone? If not, I gotta go somewhere else.

Re: The 'fuck you' pattern (2021)

#67

Post by SoftTalker » Sun, Jun 25, 2023, 4:01 PM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #56

I don’t really mind blocking ads and that sort of stuff. The social contract for websites is that they’ll send me what they want and I’ll render it however I want. But if they don’t want to send me content because I don’t have an account, that’s fair game IMO. I mean, it is fine to complain, but I get where the company is coming from. They don’t make any money off those of us who block all their stuff. So, why do the…

Because 90% of their userbase doesn't think about this stuff and doesn't block anything. Why waste effort trying to rope the last few people into your schemes, when they will just find some other way around it or get pissed, write blog posts that get posted to HN, and abandon your platform otherwise.

Re: The 'fuck you' pattern (2021)

#68

Post by alpaca128 » Sun, Jun 25, 2023, 4:01 PM UTC

galoisscobi wrote: post #8

I don’t think this is a dark pattern per se. You don’t expect to walk into any restaurant and get free food. With meta products, you pay for content by being tracked. If you refuse to sign in, they refuse to show you content. It’s simple.

> you pay for content by being tracked

No, the user doesn't know the price and isn't ever informed in clear terms about the consequences of using the site. Going with your analogy it's not payment, it's theft. We all know why Meta and others bury all the details in legalese somewhere in their terms of service - they know most users don't know how comprehensive and invasive the tracking is, and hope it stays that way.

Re: The 'fuck you' pattern (2021)

#69

Post by gavinray » Sun, Jun 25, 2023, 4:03 PM UTC

macNchz wrote: post #61

Reddit’s mobile web experience really embraces this–even as a logged in user there is a frequent “Use our app!” popup that has been made progressively more obnoxious. Once upon a time there was a preference option to disable the popup, though it would periodically become unchecked on its own. Then the option to disable it disappeared. Then the popup started appearing not just on page load, but after a period of time…

Recently on mobile it's stopped giving me the option to even view the page anonymously, at least for adult content.

It gives me:

  "This is mature content and may not be appropriate for certain viewers. To continue, use the app to confirm you're over 18 and browse anonymously."

Re: The 'fuck you' pattern (2021)

#70

Post by janandonly » Sun, Jun 25, 2023, 4:03 PM UTC

I feel the same burning hate like a thousand suns for FB/Meta, Google/YT and other platforms that monetize their users.

But, let's be frank here: They monetize you and me, us, the users because 1 they can and, 2, they have to.

Yes, they have to.

Imagine they provided access to their platforms for free. How would the shareholders (your retirement funds included) respond when less profit was made?

You see, we view them as public utilities, as a shared park or public garden or nice riverside picnic area, but they are not anything like that at all. They are companies that have a responsibility to the paying user, that is to the advertisers who want to track you as a viewer, to know if/how much their ads work.

The closest thing to a "public utility" on the internet to this day is email, good old SMTP/IMAP email. It's open, everybody who's not yet on Hotmail's or Gmail's spam-list can use it, and you can even develop an app for it yourself if you so wish.

The closest thing to a social open protocol is: the fedi-verse on Mastodon or the relay-based Nostr system. You don't want to be the product of a mega corp? Try these open platforms instead...